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Tor partially blocked in China

On September 25, 2009, the Great Firewall of China blocked the public list of relays and directory authorities by simple IP address blocks. Currently, about 80% of the public relays are blocked by IP address and TCP port combination. Tor users are still connecting to the network through bridges. At the simplest level, bridges are non-public relays that don't exit traffic, but instead send it on to the rest of the Tor network.

If you want to help people in China get access to the uncensored Internet, run a bridge.

An interesting thing I've struck today is blocked websites are having a blank html page sent back so all i get is a white page.

One of the more interesting blocks recently is that google translate is blocked on anything that contains 什么 two very common characters (meaning what). This seems to be a new tactic to make these services seem "unreliable" as sometimes it will work and sometimes it won't, depending on weather or not you have "什么“ in your page or not.

It is obviously that the whole public directory of Tor network has been blocked by our dear Great Firewall. I am feeling ashamed for their naming such a project with such a name - "Great Wall". The later one is a nationalistic pride for resisting foreign aggression while the former one is our shame for suppressing people's opinions.

Now bridges are the only ways for us to get what we need out there via Tor proxy. Please help us, help the people here in real need with your Tor bridge relays. We thank you people outside Mainland of China very much in advanced.

But for how long ? How long should this help sustain? There always will be an end to this . you know what i mean, It is just that we all dont want to think about it. (and yes we have never thought that the situation would become this worse, ,have we?)

Any way the current state wouldnt last for long. Either China(or ccp) push out some more ridiculous theory about purifying cyberspace than green damn to justify its action or it will keep lying through their teeth and denying everything. Either way if the we dont trash its plan as we do to green damn, the situation could be worse.

Dont even expect the situation to come loose after the National Day. I think you all heard the news that China has just finished its Golden Shield project Stage II and Blue Shield in September. Do you think those nuts will just turn off the switch and left their new toys rust in the control room? I doubt it

since Tor is an important tool to avoid censorship I propose to develop ways to distribute it in censored countries. I'm thinking about some kind of distributed Tor-downloader/updater, which transfers signed Tor packages/installers/sources in a p2p, but stealthy way. Yeah, I know automated steganography is hard, but since deep packet scanners are also automated I guess there is a chance.

The goal would be to create a way to download the software itself, if you stumble about it. It should be able to create a randomized page with a randomized version of itself. Maybe by presenting a page based heavily on javascript, so it is even harder to scan it. If you install it you also have a way to download Tor (and maybe other interesting software) in an easy and secure way using a special protocol. Random ports, encryption, looks like other protocols (like games, emails, http(s)), ...

So many ideas. If I have enough time I implement something like this, but maybe someone else could do it (too).

We've already started to work on a distributed distribution, with the expected secure updates and downloads. It's called Thandy for now, and one of our google summer of code students integrated bittorrent into it. You can read more about it at https://blog.torproject.org/blog/bittorrent-support-thandy.

This doesn't mean our solution is the only solution. Getting others to extend or rethink our work is a fine idea and goal.

We are working on helping users in Iran. We learned much about how iran works online in June/July of this year. We're working with many people to figure out next steps for Iran now. It seems Tor users in China and Iran both need bridges right now.

I am from China, Now all other softwares (like freegate,ultrasurf,etc. or some VPN servers) seem to be blocked, Tor is the only software that can drill a hole in G.F.W, thanks a lot to those people who developed the Tor!!! we will never forget you!

I'm in Jiangsu,CHINA. TOR with bridge is working very well here. thanks.
And I find many TOR mirror sites via google.com,so I can download TOR software directly.
But I warry about upgrading of GFW in the future.